>https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/05/21/0032211/hp-rushes-to-fix-bricked-printers-after-faulty-firmware-update
>
>HP printers used to be synonymous with high quality.

And that was more than 20 years ago. We had about 4-5 of their products (two printers, two laptops, pack of CDs) and each developed a fault after a while, except the CD which were junk right out of the box. The infamous heating problems in the laptops, which took exactly one cent to fix (i.e. insert one cent coin over the video chip so it would connect properly to conduct heat away) led to unsoldering the video chips. There was even a class action. They actually measured this so it would work for about thirteen months.

The last piece of evil stuff was some ten years ago, when my daughter unpacked their office printer, which just sat in the box for four years, and it immediately reported that „your ink has expired“(!).

>I started recommending against them several years ago after a client asked me to set up a $50 colour inkjet printer they'd purchased. The installer file was 700MB compressed, set up a Tomcat web server on the user's PC to manage it (with no notification it was doing that) and started phoning home and nagging about ink and other promotions.

I think the company was hijacked by its own sales department after they bought Compaq. The engineers did only what they were allowed to. Nobody in my family would ever again buy even a pencil sharpener from HP.